Batman Was Named After Two REAL Historical Heroes

Batman Was Named After Two REAL Historical Heroes

‘Bruce Wayne’ doesn’t just refer to Batman’s secret identity, it’s also the names of two real-life historical figures that Batman was named after.

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Batman Was Named After Two REAL Historical Heroes

The story of how Batman’s character was first created is one of the most fascinating origin stories in comics. Originally conceived by Bob Kane with little to go off of except a name, it wasn’t until his collaborator and idea man Bill Finger came along and fleshed out Kane’s bare-bones concept that the caped crusader was finally born.

It took decades for Finger to receive full credit for his work on inventing… everything except for the utility belt (which is credited to Gardner Fox, not Kane) which was a suggestion by Finger. One of the most significant contributions to the Batman mythos made by Finger was the character’s name, Bruce Wayne. Both Kane and Finger played a part in picking out Batman’s secret identity, but they didn’t just pull random names out of a hat. The duo looked at history and named the Dark Knight after two real-life historical figures to better help symbolize Batman as a character.

The first of Batman’s namesakes is someone movie fans are probably already familiar with, Robert the Bruce, known in pop culture as one of the supporting characters in Mel Gibson’s best movie, Braveheart. Interestingly enough it was Robert Bruce who was given the real-life nickname of Braveheart after his death, not film protagonist William Wallace. According to Bob Kane’s autobiography, Batman and Me, Finger wanted to pick someone associated with nobility and the landed gentry to emphasize Batman’s modern role as a millionaire playboy, so he chose Robert the Bruce because of his accusation with Scottish royalty. With his first name taken care of, it was up to Kane to pick his last name.

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Batman’s last name was suggested by Kane and was one of the few original ideas he had that made it to print. Kane chose to look at American colonial history and named Batman after “Mad” Anthony Wayne, a Brigadier General in the American revolution who earned his epithet because of the way he ferociously fought against the British. “Mad” Anthony is actually the canonical ancestor to Batman in DC Comics, and there was even a time when Batman went back in time to meet his ancestor in World’s Finest #187 in yet another bizarre Silver Age adventure from the 60s.

It’s fitting that Batman would be descended from a hero of the American revolution, as later writers would emphasize Gotham City’s role in the Revolutionary war. In Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing (the same run where Swamp Thing effortlessly destroyed Batman) the reader is shown how the Wayne family historically helped build and maintain Gotham from Colonial times until the present. Naming Batman after a war hero fighting for independence is very on the nose symbolism but it works to emphasize the core traits of his character: that he will never give up and always fight for what’s right.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/batman-name-historical-figures-dc-comics/

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